OBJECTIVES: The Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group Program of the University of Pennsylvania Cancer Center seeks to: 1. provide a sounding board for ideas, a communication system for new information and a mechanism for testing therapeutic modalities in greater numbers of patients than is possible to accomplish alone in a single institution; 2. carry out pilot studies of cancer therapy for subsequent large scale testing by the ECOG as a whole group; 3. provide continued effective leadership of the ECOG Hematology Committee both from an administrative and a scientific viewpoint; 4. continue our interdisciplinary program of combined modality studies with an emphasis on joint chemotherapy-radiotherapy protocols.